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Relaunch

Welcome! It’s been far too long since I’ve been blogging, but I’m back now. So I thought I’d start out this new blog with a quick catch up on where I’ve been, what’s been going on and what things I’m focusing on these days.

Personally – I’m quite a few years older and hopefully a little bit wiser. I decided a few years ago that it didn’t make sense for me to live somewhere that wasn’t making me happy. I wanted to get back to nature and enjoy more time outdoors. So I packed up the family, and we moved to a small beach town in Florida. It’s been wonderful to have more consistent weather year-round and to be able to go outside and occasionally see wildlife (just last week there was a very cute little bobcat standing in my driveway).

Last time I was blogging – I had just published my second Rails book and found myself becoming consumed by a startup. With my free time dwindling, I thought it might be best to abandon the custom CMS I had run my blog on for several years and switch to a hosted platform. Squarespace seemed like it offered the bells and whistles I thought would be fun and they offered unlimited bandwidth, so they appeared to be a good fit. Unfortunately, the user experience for actually getting something I wrote posted was painful (at least for my workflow). So even when I wrote things, I ended up never posting them because I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of getting them online – plus when you’re looking for reasons to avoid something, it’s very easy to come up with reasons not to. I’ve moved the blog now and think that this new system will allow me an easier time to write and also post videos from time-to-time.

From a career perspective – the startup I was with sold to Google, and I chose instead to take my money and leave. I had become a little burned out on working just to make rich people more money and was looking for something that would provide me a new challenge while also working to make a positive change in the world. After a number of job offers from some great (and a couple of not-so-great) companies – I decided to go work with ThoughtWorks for a couple of years. Well, that was almost six years ago now. Every company has its warts, but I enjoy the people that I get to work with at ThoughtWorks and the opportunities that they have provided me.

Finally as for what’s on my mind these days and what you can expect to read about here. I’ve always been passionate about finding ways to improve lives with technology. That passion has manifested itself in a variety of ways over the years: from designing products and architecture in startups; to teaching people how to code (or just how to write better code); and of course in creating custom software solutions for people. Finally after years of building yet another distributed architecture, e-commerce solution and CMS — I’ve found a new way to channel that passion that I’m incredibly excited about.